Design-driven Strategies for Creative Social Innovation Ecosystems

Purpose: Within the scientific literature on social innovation, several researchers from different areas are suggesting alternatives to promote, to sustain and to disseminate social innovation. However those approaches are unable to cope with the long-term sustainability of social innovation processes and projects mostly because they do not consider the contextual and processual dimensions. The paper presents an approach to fill this gap, which means to act in ecosystem perspective.

Design / Methodology / Approach: The paper is an essay that critically explores the concepts of social innovation, design discourse, infrastructuring, seeding, and the contribution of design-driven strategies to the long-term sustainability and to the dissemination of social innovation processes, through reviewing design, management and sociology theories.

Results: Through the exploration, discussion and association of the above presented concepts, we propose an approach to promote creative social innovation ecosystems based on design-driven strategies.

Originality / value: The suggested approach takes into consideration all the different stages and dimensions of social innovation.